Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  Gerald liked Argentina and its inhabitants almost as much as Jacquie did. He found a warmth, charm and eccentricity in their character which matched his own, and before long the couple were surrounded by a band of helpers and friends – Bebita, Josefina, Rafael and his sister Mercedes and his cousin Marie Renee Rodrigue and many others – whose cheery devotion and hospitality was unflagging. Without them the venture could hardly have succeeded; with them even its hardships became a joy. Only the Customs were a pain, keeping the party waiting a whole month before finally releasing their equipment.

  The broad plan of the expedition was simple – first, to collect animals for the new zoo, and second, to shoot a number of television wildlife programmes. The itinerary was no less straightforward. First, head south out of Buenos Aires by Land-Rover, crossing the pampas to the wastes of Patagonia and the huge penguin colony beyond Puerto Deseado and the fur seal and elephant seal colonies of Peninsula Valdes, where Gerald hoped to shoot at least two programmes of his proposed television series. Second, return to Buenos Aires, regroup, then charge off in the opposite direction to the fauna-rich far north-west of the country, where the land rises towards the snow-white heights of the Andes.

  Patagonia was bleak, strange, disorientating, a monotonous desert of scrub and black sand dunes haunted by the ghosts and relics of long-exterminated Indian tribes. The penguin colonies, numbering some two million birds and reeking of stale fish, stretched for miles along a shore pockmarked with nesting hollows like tiny moon craters. ‘Strange, plodding, sturdy little birds,’ Gerald scribbled in his unpublished notes, ‘walking with a shuffling flat-footedness, like elderly waiters whose arches have long ago collapsed under the strain of a lifetime of carrying overloaded trays.’ The fur seals dwelt in a bedlam of their own making – ‘exactly like a volcano about to erupt’, Jacquie was to recall. ‘Roar, belch, gurgle, bleat and chough,’ Gerald jotted, ‘a constant undulation of sound like the boiling of an enormous cauldron of porridge. Gleaming gold in the sun like a restless swarm of bees.’ ‘Durrell was busy shooting roll after roll of film,’ Jacquie recorded. ‘He was drunk with pleasure and so madly in love with the seals that it was with the greatest difficulty we prised him away.’

  The delay seemed to have been disastrous, for the small beach where the elephant seals should have been found contained nothing but a scattering of curiously shaped boulders, and it was assumed that the creatures had headed off to Tierra del Fuego. Sitting among the boulders, the party rued the length of time they had spent with the fur seals. Then something very odd happened. ‘Marie, with the air of someone who is used to disaster,’ Gerald was to write, ‘seized a bottle of wine, and as the cork popped out of the bottle a large, slightly elongated and egg-shaped boulder some ten feet away gave a deep and lugubrious sigh, and opened a pair of huge, gentle, liquid-looking eyes of the deepest black, and gazed at us placidly.’ Miraculously, another eleven lumps of rock turned into living flesh – giant creatures, some of them more than twenty feet long. Gerald shot his film and the party returned to Buenos Aires in good cheer. But not for long.

  Before setting off for Patagonia, Jacquie had been injured in a traffic accident in Buenos Aires. Josefina was at the wheel, and failed to notice that the traffic lights – the only ones in the city – had changed. ‘Lights!’ Jacquie had shouted a split-second before the Land-Rover ploughed into the car in front. ‘The next thing I knew I was being thrown forward into the windscreen,’ she remembered, ‘then grabbed by Durrell, who pulled me towards him. Streams of blood flowed over the pair of us. People appeared from everywhere, all shouting and offering help. I still felt perfectly fine, except for the blood which was slowly covering us both.’ At the city hospital Jacquie had five stitches in her forehead, a white-faced Gerald, far more upset than she was, holding her hand. That had seemed the end of the matter, but during the last half of the Patagonia foray Jacquie had begun to feel very ill, with constant backache and blinding headaches exacerbated by the jolting over the terrible Patagonian roads, and it seemed possible that she was actually suffering from a fractured skull. Once back in the heat and humidity of the capital she realised she could not continue, and that the only sensible course was to return to Britain for treatment as soon as possible. Reluctantly Gerald agreed, and in the middle of February 1959 she sailed away on the only boat which happened to have a single berth free.

  Sophie was delegated to stay behind in Buenos Aires to look after the growing animal collection while Gerald embarked on the second stage of the expedition. His destination was the north-western province of Jujuy, a lush, tropical area, bordered by the mountains of Bolivia on one side and the arid region of Salta on the other. His plan was to base himself on a sugar estate in the valley of Calilegua, where he had friends, and from there to begin collecting animals with the help of a tiny, black-eyed, black-haired Argentinean called Luna and a big, blue-eyed, blond-haired Argentinean called Helmuth. With Jacquie gone the expedition had lost its organisational genius; from now on the television film took second place, and Gerald was not destined to fulfil his dream of becoming a leading director-cameraman of wildlife programmes.

  This was the first time Gerald had been separated from his wife for a substantial period of time. Although their relationship had occasionally been strained, particularly during the Cameroons expedition, he missed Jacquie desperately, and felt lost and insecure without her. When he was in Buenos Aires he phoned her frequently. When he was up-country on his collecting and filming trips, he would write her long letters that not only conveyed news and gossip about the expedition’s progress but expressed a deep yearning to be one with her again, and a terrible gnawing doubt that perhaps, for some reason not explained or even understood, he never would be. From Calilegua he wrote her an account of a foray up a five-thousand-foot mountain range with Helmuth and Luna:

  We went up on horseback, and it was a wonderful experience. At the top was a tiny wooden shack in which we lived, surrounded by the most lovely forest full of tapirs, toucans and parakeets. The floor of the forest was covered with the most extraordinary fungi and toadstools I have ever seen, hundreds of different types and shapes, so the leaf mould looked like a coral reef. We had brought up a group of five hunters and twelve dogs, but in spite of dashing about wildly they caught nothing. However, our horses and the pack mules were attacked by vampire bats, and this was interesting. Just like a dracula film they looked in the morning in the clotted blood in huge stripes down their necks, poor brutes. Greatly interested I decided to see if I could get a vampire to bite me. I was sleeping outside the hut, as inside was full of seven people and I preferred fresh air and less garlic. So that night I shifted my bed nearer the horse and popped my foot out of the blankets, for vampires like the big toe to feed on. Needless to say nothing happened, though I lay there for hours, but the horses were attacked again. Charles said it was because vampires preferred blood to gin that they didn’t attack me. Since then I have remembered that the damn things carry rabies, so it was just as well.

  … In the time I did not do too badly. This is the list. One half grown Puma, one Ocelot, one Geffroys cat, two young Coatis, four blue fronted Amazon parrots, one red fronted Amazon (Blanco), six little parakeets, two yellow necked Macaws (rare, I think, and may be first timers), two Agoutis, six Brazilian rabbits, two Seriamas (one of each species), two very nice Guans, two lovely collared Peccaries, the baby female of which is an absolute sweetie.

  The collection was so large that the only way to bring it back to Buenos Aires was by train – an agonising journey of two nights and two days. Gerald wrote to Jacquie:

  The train trip was really quite fun, but exhausting. The poor beasts suffered from the heat, but I could not do anything about that. As could only happen on an Argentine train everyone soon knew that I had animals in the van, and they would all lean out of the windows at each stop and ask after the puma, or tell me where the nearest water tap was …

  In my absence Soph had added a very nice half grown
Capybara to the collection and a most lovely pair of young, but adult, Douracoulis. You will love them, darling. Claudius the tapir is fine and is now about the size of a cow, eating like hell and wanting his own way as usual. (Blanco has just come in from the kitchen, climbed on to my shoulder and inquired how I am.)

  Darling, you don’t have to keep telling me you love me … if you didn’t you would never have put up with me. All I am or ever will be is due to you. You are a part of me, and now I am without my right arm. In a little over two months I will be able to kiss you and tell you what I mean … but remember until I come back that I have always been and will always be yours … without you I am nothing.

  Gerald had a great many things on his mind in Buenos Aires. For one thing, unbelievably, he was still trying to write his Africa book. ‘I’m struggling to finish Zoo in my Luggage,’ he told Jacquie, ‘and hope to be able to do so and send it off before I leave Argentina, so there will be some money in the kitty. It’s a bit difficult because I can only write at night, and I feel so bloody tired but nevertheless am keeping at it. It will be very bad but never mind. Don’t, darling, please don’t worry about cash: I can earn enough for anything when I get back, and I promise you I will, so please don’t get worried or depressed about that: you know what I can earn if I try.’

  He was thinking of going off to Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes in the far west of the country, for a week, in pursuit of the rare little fairy armadillo. David Jones, an agreeable young Anglo-Argentinean who had become a kind of younger brother and general factotum to Gerald, and an invaluable replacement for Jacquie in all the practical matters of day-to-day living, would accompany him. There was a paved road all the way to Mendoza, and hopefully the incessant rain would stop. ‘If it doesn’t,’ Gerald wrote in desperation, ‘I really don’t see how I can produce more than three or possibly four programmes. I did so hope that the Elephant seal, fur seal and penguins would make two programmes, but if you remember I was doubtful at the time.’

  The growing collection of animals now temporarily housed at the museum in Buenos Aires left little time for other things, but nothing so preoccupied Gerald as his uncertainty about the strength and durability of his marriage.

  ‘Did I mention that I love you?’ he wrote to Jacquie. ‘That I miss you? That I wish we were leaving tomorrow so I could be with you? Well, I do. Darling I am yours and only yours: not a very good bargain for you but there it is. And now I must stop playing the middle aged lover and go and have a shower as we are going to Blondie’s for dinner, and David has just laid out my clothes for me … if you ever divorce me I shall marry him. I will write again soon, darling. Keep well and safe for me.’

  ‘Darling,’ he wrote again soon, ‘this is a horribly short note but David and I are off to Mendoza at midnight, and we are in the middle of our packing. I will write you when we arrive there I promise. But I just wanted to let you know that I love you, and I want you so much. It won’t be long now darling. Goodnight. G.’

  They left for Mendoza at three o’clock in the morning. The trip was uneventful. Gerald slept until dawn and then took over the wheel while David had a rest. ‘Suddenly my ears started to pop,’ he wrote to Jacquie:

  … we came to the top of a rise and there before us were the outriders of the Andes, a wonderful chain of weirdly shaped mountains, all wearing a sort of fragile shawl of snow over their heads. It was so lovely and exciting that I woke David up to share it, and all he did was to grunt and then tell me the engine was pinking. This so affected me that I sat down at dinner that night and wrote the enclosed poem that might amuse you.

  First sight of the Andes with technical companion

  Pause here, what vistas now unfold

  Bannered with sunset flags of pink and gold

  The Andean vertebrae all striped with snow

  That here and there takes on a ruby glow,

  (‘I think the fan belt is about to go’) …

  Here in the sky, like crosses pinned,

  The Condors hang, suspended in the wind.

  Weaving, swooping, bigger circles winding,

  Seeking, ever seeking, rarely finding,

  (‘I think the intake valves need grinding’)

  Now in the moonlight, watch the snow caps glisten,

  To hear the crackling stars, you only have to listen.

  Silence, silence, hear the flowers dew drinking,

  Wrapt in their shadows, every peak is thinking.

  (‘Shut up! I think the engine’s pinking’) …

  Hear now the silence and the bat’s wing beating,

  (‘I think the engine’s overheating!’)

  Here then a product of God’s imagination,

  (‘Thank God, at last, a Service Station!’)

  When I read this to David he said that the engine was more important to him than the Andes, as he had to maintain the engine but not the mountains, which I suppose is fair enough.

  Darling, I love you. Since you left I have lost all real enthusiasm for the trip: I have no one to yell at or blame or be nasty to, no one who knows what a bastard I am and still puts up with me, no one to tell me how good I am when I know I’m not, no one to just be there when I need them, no one to love. I really want to come back to England (and I never thought I would) and I wish we were leaving earlier than May. Whatever you decide eventually to do I shall still love you, and I hope you will love me. All I ask is that you don’t make up your mind firmly before I get back. I can’t promise to reform and be a good boy and always do what you want me to because you would know that this was a lie and impossible, because you know me. So all I can say is that if you stay with me I shall be the same bastard I have always been, with luck a little better but I can’t promise: all I know is that I have discovered just how much I love you since you left.

  While Gerald was in Argentina, David Attenborough had been filming and collecting armadillos and other small animals in the Gran Chaco of Paraguay. When he returned to Buenos Aires with his animals at the end of his expedition, he heard that another collector was in town, waiting for a ship to take his collection to England. It was Gerald Durrell. They had met before, when Attenborough was still a relatively junior BBC producer. Now, in Buenos Aires, Gerald was to describe his zoo idea to him. Attenborough remembered:

  He was in his early thirties, but he looked ten years younger, with long hair flopping down over his eyes. We were to some extent rivals, but my most enduring memory of him at that time was his huge engaging grin and his rich line in repartee. We had a lot of common interest to talk about: how you could cure an armadillo’s diarrhoea by mixing soil with its meals of minced meat and condensed milk; how astonishing it was that the favoured food of that most extraordinary of the dog tribe, the maned wolf, was not meat but bananas. As the evening wore on and we moved from beer to cheap South American brandy, Gerry talked more and more about his plans. He told me he was starting his zoo and I just thought he was mad. How could anyone, except a millionaire, start his own zoo? Gerry was undaunted. He had already proved he could write a best-seller. He would write a few more and use the royalties to finance the zoo of his dreams.

  Such a zoo, Gerald informed Attenborough, would be very different from the average zoo, of which he was bitterly critical. Most cages and enclosures, he complained, were designed more for the convenience of the public than the comfort and needs of the animals. And most zoos kept the wrong kinds of animals – big, dramatic creatures such as lions and tigers, rhinos and hippos, which cost a lot of money to keep and took up a lot of space. Smaller creatures like marmosets, armadillos, scorpions, butterflies and even ants could interest the public just as much if they were properly looked after and displayed. ‘Most of all,’ Attenborough recalled, ‘he was critical of zoos which made no attempt to breed their inmates. Sometimes they did not even bother to keep them together in pairs. When one died, the zoo simply sent somebody to catch another … He was going to change all that.’

  Years later, looking back on th
e task that faced him as he prepared to leave Argentina, Gerald was amazed at his temerity, his hubris – and grateful for the naive optimism that blinded him to the immensity of the undertaking on which he was now embarked.

  * * *

  * In fact the oldest parts of the building date back to the fifteenth century.

  PART THREE

  The Price of Endeavour

  SIXTEEN

  A Zoo is Born

  1959–1960

  In the makeshift menagerie in Margaret’s back garden in Bournemouth, the hardier animals were bracing themselves for their third winter in Britain. Across the water in Jersey, the manor house lay empty and shuttered, huddled in the hush of its tree-enshrouded valley grounds, poised – after five hundred years of unbroken rural domesticity and calm – on the brink of a more dramatic and clamorous history.

  During the winter the first wave of animals took possession of the manor farm that was to be their home. With the help of Ken Smith and Gerry Breeze, Margaret’s eighteen-year-old son, the cages were loaded up and driven to Weymouth docks to catch the ferry to Jersey. At Les Augrès Manor they were stowed in outbuildings and barns while the serious business of building more permanent enclosures and cages began. Gerald was not there, but he was kept informed. ‘Les Augrès Manor was a scene of frenzied activity,’ he was to record. ‘Carpenters and masons rushing about laying cement, making cages out of everything they could lay their hands on. Cages on legs we called them, made out of untreated wood, chain link and chicken wire. Packing crates were wonderfully converted into shelters and every available piece of iron piping or wrought iron from the junk yard was grist to our mill. We transformed the things people discarded as being of no further use into animal havens and shelters: cages ungainly and ugly but serviceable sprouted everywhere.’